Richard King

Monday, February 16, 2015

It fell to US journalist Adam Kirsch,
writing in The New Republic in 2008, to encapsulate in a single phrase
the disconcerting experience of reading a book by Slavoj Žižek. Kirsch called Žižek
‘the deadly jester’, a description that managed to bring together the Slovenian
philosopher’s showmanship with his extreme political stance (he is as far to
the left politically as he is to the right alphabetically), while also
suggesting that these two sides are related: that this ‘dangerous’ philosopher is
all the more dangerous for his reputation as ‘the Elvis of cultural theory’. According
to this popular view, Žižek’s philosophy is a Trojan horse – a gaudy offering to
which the threat of violence is, as he might say himself, ‘immanent’. [More here.]

It is a principle
of Raimond Gaita’s thought that one cannot separate moral truths from the
manner of their articulation, and that the manner of their articulation will depend
on who is doing the articulating. In other words, what we say about morality is
deeply connected to the way we say it, which is connected, in turn, to who we
are. For Gaita, moral truths are to be tested, not on the page, but in the
world; values have to be ‘embodied’. It is for this reason that Romulus, My
Father is so central to his work as a whole. That
memoir of his childhood in Victoria, with all its attendant griefs and wonders,
is significant not just for the morality of its ‘characters’ – the ‘summer-coloured
humanism’ of Romulus and his best friend Hora – but for the author’s relationship
to that morality, a relationship that is at once intellectual and
emotional, and no less ‘real’ for being a combination of the two. Put simply, Gaita
is a moral philosopher whose work depends on openness to others. [More here.]

Friday, December 19, 2014

In 2013 the
comedian Russell Brand, who is known for his rock-star garb and hyperactive
stage performances, guest-edited an issue of the New Statesman and declared in
his editorial that he had never voted in a general election. An interviewer on
the BBC's Newsnight wanted to know why, and also, given the
comedian’s apathy, why anyone should care what he had to say. As he put it,
rather more pointedly, ‘Why, if you can’t be arsed to vote, should we be arsed
to listen to your political point of view?’ [More here.]

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Confessing one’s ignorance is not, perhaps, the ideal way
to begin an article, but the recent debate about whether or not Grand Theft
Auto V is misogynistic is not one to which I’m able to contribute. The last
video games I played regularly were Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner, and,
frankly, I was terrible at them. (I do occasionally tune in to Good Game,
but only in order to stare wistfully at Stephanie Bendixen, aka ‘Hex’.)
Certainly GTA5 looks quite nasty. From the promotional clips I’ve seen
on YouTube I would even go so far as to say that the principal characters are
up to no good. But that’s as far as I’ll go on the matter. [More here.]

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

It
is easy to laugh at ‘Grammar Nazis’ – easy and, frequently, necessary. People
who obsess about beginning sentences with conjunctions, or ending them with
prepositions, are to be studiously avoided at parties, while those who object
to the use of ‘which’ in restrictive clauses are only marginally less
irritating. As for the empurpled nitwits who complain loudly about split
infinitives (an invented rule, and the crowning stupidity of nineteenth-century
prescriptivism) – those who haven’t died of natural causes should be, for their
own sakes, humanely put down. [More here.]

Friday, November 28, 2014

At some point in the 1990s, a poster began
to appear on the London Underground. It depicted four brains, three of which
were identical and one of which was much smaller than the others. From a
distance, it appeared to be a crude taxonomy of the kind that one might
associate with a nineteenth-century phrenologist. But closer inspection revealed
a political message. Set out in a line, with the small one last, the brains
were labelled, respectively, ‘African’, ‘European’, ‘Asian’, and ‘Racist’. [More here.]

As someone who is always in the market for irony, I’ll admit to having felt
slightly giddy when I first read that the Abbott government had utilised Australia’s seat on the UN Security Council to formulate
a recovery mission to Ukraine in the wake of the MH17 disaster. After all, it
was Tony Abbott who, six months in to his stint as opposition leader, described
Kevin Rudd’s bid for a seat on the Council (costed at around $13 million) as a
vanity project and a waste of money. (That was in mid 2010, at which point
Abbott was getting into character as his alter ego ‘Dr No’.) That he would
utilise the seat in such a statesmanlike manner was thus a rather neat
reversal. A shame he had to spoil the effect by threatening to ‘shirtfront’ the
Russian President. But hey, you can’t have everything. [More here.]

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

There used to be a convention
at the seamier end of the pornography market whereby models would be
de-identified by way of a dark strip across their eyes. The aim of this strip,
presumably, was to protect the honour of the featured models – these being the
days before the internet had made us all a little less chaste. Its effect,
however, was strangely brutalising: denuded of her eyes – ‘the windows to the
soul’, as Professor Marcus has it in The Ladykillers – the woman became,
even more than before, a plaything of the male gaze: a piece of meat, in other
words. [More here.]

Of all the indispensable
words to have slipped their definitional moorings in the latter decades of the
twentieth century – ‘iconic’, ‘tragedy’, ‘legendary’ – ‘ironic’ is perhaps the
most conspicuous. Certainly its fall from semantic grace has been one of the more
spectacular: where once this adjective was pressed into service to describe
appropriate reversals of fortune or knowing asides at one’s own expense, it now
denotes little more than coincidence or simple incongruity. ‘How ironic is that?!’
an old friend will declare, having bumped into you for the second time in a
week. Well, not ironic at all, actually, or no more ironic than ‘rain on your
wedding day’, to take one of the instances of irony proffered by a certain
Canadian songstress. [More here.]

Friday, September 19, 2014

‘The
trouble with you socialists is that you don’t know anything about economics.’
The businessman – a wealthy retailer – was talking to a miner in Western Australia. ‘What you don’t seem to understand’, he
continued, ‘is that every time you get an increase in your wages, the cost of
living rises with them.’

‘So what are you saying?’ enquired the miner; ‘That if we asked for a pay cut
the cost of living would go down?’

Taken aback by the miner’s question, the businessman had to admit that, yes –
that was indeed what he was saying.

‘All right then,’ said the miner, ‘we’ll ask for a pay cut. And then we’ll ask
for another pay cut. And I suppose that in a few years’ time you cunts will be
paying us to take your stuff away!’ [More here.]

To say that the pace of modern life is
unconducive to lyric poetry is not so much to flirt with cliché as to drop your
keys down cliché’s blouse and insist upon retrieving them. It’s also undeniable.
Assailed from all sides by all manner of trivia, we’ve lost the habit of sustained
contemplation needed to engage with this most challenging of art forms; so many
and so various are the demands upon our attention that attention itself has
atrophied. Nor is it only social media and click-bait junkies who are at issue
here. In an interview in 2006, the unashamedly highbrow Martin Amis admitted to
feeling increasingly rushed – such that poetry had been pushed to one side: ‘When
you’re reading your New York Review of Books, some piece about North Korea or the Middle East, and there’s a poem in the middle of it, you think, What is
that doing there?’ [More here.]

'In any English-speaking newspaper, of whatever altitude, news and culture tend to be separated by a rabbit-proof fence, but Richard King has been given a free hand to make news out of culture, and without trivialising the second thing in favour of the first.' Clive James. (Read more here.)